How to avoid the blame game in marriage

When conflicts arise in your marriage, are you quick to point the finger at your spouse? Dr. Glenn Pickering says the majority of marital conflicts are the result of the blame game, poor communication and destructive patterns. He shares from thirty years of experience helping couples breakdown communication barriers.

“Sometimes couples say that they don’t communicate. Well, I think they communicate a lot, they just do it poorly. By which I mean that they have a pattern they get into; when they get angry maybe it gets loud and then they both just walk away. They try to talk about something and it goes poorly so they both shut down and nobody talks. Or they try to have a conversation about money but somehow it always ends up going in a different direction.”

“There’s a pattern that happens where instead of having a conversation that’s helpful to us, that resolves a conflict or gives us a sense of direction, somehow we just have the same old dumb conversation over and over again.”

A part of Dr. Pickering’s practice is to help couples understand and identify patterns in their marriage. Instead of pointing the finger at our spouse, Dr. Pickering encourages us to follow Jesus’ advice and take ownership of our part in the problem.

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” Matthew 7:3

“I talk to people a lot about the game I call TAG, we have this sort of knee-jerk instinct to want to not be the one that’s it, where we want to blame the other person to see what their part of that problem is. But it’s really important to slow down and prayerfully ask, ‘God, help me to see my half of that.'”

If you want to see a change in your relationship, it often starts with you. Be the first to recognize your part of the problem and be willing to take the necessary steps that will allow you to build a stronger marriage.

Dr. Glenn Pickering is, at heart, a scientist and a teacher. The TAG-related books and seminars that he and his wife, Gwen, have created contain the revolutionary insights, real-life examples, and concrete change strategies that have transformed people’s lives and that will help you to create the powerful, loving relationships you always wanted.